Instead, I sighed and took a step sideways, away from him. “Maybe I am. But then why do I feel so right?”

He stared at me for a long moment, hurt, and I felt anxiety and sorrow twist in my gut. Then Jesse shook his head in disbelief. “This is about Eli. You’re pushing me away because of him.”

“Eli’s out of the picture,” I corrected him. “He left LA.”

“Then it’s still about Olivia,” he insisted. “You think you can’t be happy because of what happened with her.”

I gave him a sad smile. “No, Jesse. For once, this isn’t about the psycho hose beast. This is just me.”

He paced a few feet away from me, and then turned on his heel and came back. “Do you love me?” he demanded. I blinked, unsure of how to respond. “Do you?” he pressed.

“Yes,” I said quietly. “I love you. But I don’t trust you.”

Jesse rocked back like I had hit him.

I could have kept talking. I could have explained that I trusted him to have my back, to keep me safe, but I didn’t trust that he wouldn’t wake up next to me in a week, a month, a year, and decide that I was a stranger. That I was tainted.

I could have talked and talked, but we would have always ended up back here, with that betrayed expression on his face. “I need to take a walk,” he said abruptly.

“Jesse . . . ,” I began.

He waved an arm to dismiss whatever I was about to say and marched off toward the front of the house.

I breathed in and out, slowly. And I let him go.

After our talk, the excitement finally began to wind down. I texted Dashiell with the go-ahead, and he arranged for an anonymous tip to be called in to the police station nearest the ugly wedding cake-condo. A few minutes after Petra Corbett returned from Will’s house, the police knocked on her door and found her in the middle of packing her bags. They claimed that they’d received a report of a man screaming in pain, and an annoyed Petra invited them in to prove that the condo was empty. When the cops opened the door to the back bedroom, however, they found a very dead Henry Remus, stark naked, lying next to a big pile of creepy, macabre prop house items: jaws full of fangs, vicious claws, stone knives. They all had Remus’s blood on them. There was also a bunch of Remus’s blood and hair inside a huge wire cage, along with a totally illegal Taser.

Jesse had hated planting that evidence, but he’d agreed it was the only option we had left. None of those things had any fingerprints on them, of course, but later we learned that when they searched the front bedroom, the police found a lot of weirdo occult stuff: spell books and charms and creepy black candles. And those things were covered in Petra’s DNA.

Personally, I enjoyed the irony of the Luparii scout getting arrested for the one murder we were sure she hadn’t committed. Jesse saw it a little differently. “She wanted the nova wolf,” he said righteously to Will. He wasn’t meeting my eyes. “And she got him.”

“If she hires a really good attorney and fights hard, that evidence may not stick,” Will warned us.

I shrugged. “I bet they’ll at least deport her ass, though.”

An hour later, Jesse called the relevant LAPD station and confirmed that Petra had been officially booked for murder. The pack was free to go back into the park and change.

Which meant that Corry was done for the night. I was supposed to take her home after I’d walked the pack into the park, but Jesse pulled me aside and asked me if he could drive her home instead. “I’m ready to be done,” he said plainly.

I flinched. “Jesse . . . ,” I said, touching his arm.

He shook it off and started to walk toward the door. Then he paused. “You’re wrong, you know,” he said, turning to face me. He was so angry.

“About what?”

“I do know you,” he said firmly. “These things you do—the things we did today—you push them out of your head. Terrible things.” He stepped closer and added, not unkindly, “What happens when you can’t run away from them anymore? What happens when everything you’ve seen catches up with you?”

I recoiled as though he’d slapped me. We stood there looking at each other for a moment, and then he stepped in and kissed me on the head. “The thing that scares me,” he said very quietly, “is that by then, maybe you won’t find them so terrible.”

And he left, taking Corry with him.

Chapter 49

I didn’t cry, although I wanted to. I was sure I had done the right thing, but watching Jesse walk away still felt suspiciously like giving up on my own future.

When they were gone, I extended my radius to keep the wolves human until we could get a little deeper in the park. “Everybody ready?” I called.

About half of them left their pj’s at Will’s house, unashamed, while the rest of them kept them on. We hiked into the woods, going very slowly in my honor. We were a strange procession: almost twenty people compromising a mixed bag of ages and races, gathered around a girl with a cane like they were my Secret Service detail. Will brought up the rear to make sure there weren’t any stragglers who got out of my radius. Nobody spoke much on the way, but after a few minutes I became aware of a man sidling toward me. I took a deep breath, working to keep the concentration required to extend the radius, and looked closer at him.

He was African American, with snow-white hair, and he looked like he was in his mid-fifties. I recognized him right away. He had been on a flight from New York with me a couple of weeks earlier, and he’d sent me champagne out of gratitude for making him human on the long flight. “Hello, again,” I said politely. “I didn’t realize you were actually part of the LA pack.”